Industry increasingly depends upon highly automated distributed data acquisition and control systems to ensure that industrial processes are run efficiently, safely and reliably while lowering their overall production costs. A number of sensors measure aspects of an industrial process and periodically report their measurements back to data collection and/or control systems. Such measurements come in a wide variety of forms and are used by industrial process control systems to regulate a variety of operations, both with respect to continuous and discrete manufacturing processes. By way of example the measurements produced by a sensor/recorder include: a temperature, a pressure, a pH, a mass/volume flow of material, a quantity of bottles filled per hour, a tallied inventory of packages waiting in a shipping line, or a photograph of a room in a factory. Often sophisticated process management and control software examines the incoming data, produces status reports, and, in many cases, responds by sending commands to actuators/controllers that adjust the operation of at least a portion of the industrial process. The data produced by the sensors also allow an operator to perform a number of supervisory tasks including: tailor the process (e.g., specify new set points) in response to varying external conditions (including costs of raw materials), detect an inefficient/non-optimal operating condition and/or impending equipment failure, and take remedial actions such as adjust a valve position, or even move equipment into and out of service as required.
Typical industrial processes today are extremely complex and comprise many intelligent devices such as transmitters, positioners, motor drives, limit switches and other communication enabled devices. By way of example, it is not unheard of to have large projects having tens of thousands of sensors and control elements (e.g., valve actuators) monitoring/controlling aspects of a multi-stage process within an industrial plant.
As field devices have become more advanced over time, the process of setting up, performing diagnostics, and maintaining field devices for use in particular installations has also increased in complexity.
In previous generations of industrial process control equipment, and more particularly field devices, transmitters and positioners were comparatively simple components.
More contemporary field devices include digital data transmitting capabilities and on-device digital processors, referred to generally as “intelligent” field devices. Such devices generally support an extensive set of parameters for providing a variety of status, diagnostic and process variable values.
A particular type of intelligent field device incorporates the Fieldbus Foundation (or Fieldbus) protocol/architecture. In process control systems that embody the Fieldbus protocol, the individual field devices possess the capability to executing a control program distributed across multiple components in the form of device blocks (e.g., function blocks). The Fieldbus protocol/architecture thus facilitates executing control logic in the field devices themselves rather than relying upon control logic executed in higher level process control components (e.g., control processors executing compounds containing sets of cyclically sequentially executed function blocks).
In known Fieldbus systems, blocks are serially deployed from a configuration, maintained by the application database, on a block-by-block basis to devices within which the particular blocks are ultimately executed. In complex systems, where multiple Fieldbus field devices are connected to a single control module assembly (e.g., Invensys CP 270) via one or more I/O module assemblies, blocks are deployed and connected to the process control infrastructure one block at a time. The deployment of blocks in such systems can take several seconds to minutes since each block typically contains several parameter values to be written during deployment/commissioning. In the case where many Fieldbus devices, executing potentially hundreds of blocks, are connected to a single control module assembly (e.g., INVENSYS' CP 270) via potentially several I/O module assemblies (e.g. INVENSYS' FBM 228), deploying the configurations (e.g., defined control blocks, setup scripts, etc.) to the field devices and connecting the device blocks executed in Fieldbus devices to the control infrastructure to facilitate a configured distributed process control environment can result in substantial delays (e.g., hours). Thus, a more time-efficient process/procedure is needed to deploy field device configurations, including defined device blocks that are distributed to particular ones of the field devices, to the field devices in such highly distributed process control environments.